( Tuesday, October 31, 2006 )

The S.S.

This just made my day.

Sufjan Stevens is streaming his entire collection of "Songs for Christmas" on his website. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Now you get two great things for the price of...well, free: music that is so good it's tasty and the opportunity to get in the festive spirit without having to steal copyrighted music (don't lie to me, I know you do it).

( Monday, October 30, 2006 )

Change, Nothingness Land, and Fairy's

This blog is all about change. Oh, cursed change.

But really, is there any other experience in life so constant? I vow $10 to anyone who can think of something (note: I am a liar and will not pay). For the most part, I hate change. I guess that comes down to what the word change usually means to me: unpleasantness. Puberty was certainly unpleasant. Losing my wisdom teeth was definitely unpleasant. Having to kill in the name of self-defense for the first time was, for the most part, unpleasant (note: I am a liar and have not killed anyone). The process of cultivating a beard that doesn't grow in perfect symmetry can be irritatingly unpleasant.

My standard response to change that involves emotional hurt, for example, is a simple formula I like to call The Idiot Kyle Move™. First step: cry uncontrollably (and often) like a little schoolgirl. Second step: shut off emotions completely. Of course, shutting down my emotions isn't exactly a science, but it does require some amateur surgery, surgery I am certainly not qualified to perform (though I doubt anyone is). Basically it boils down to this: I get hurt, I cut off the piece that hurts. Unfortunately, when I do this, especially with people who have been such a big part of me, I cut out huge chunks of my heart in the process. What's worse is that sometimes those people aren't just 'pieces' of my heart, but fused to the arteries and veins and muscles, to the very fiber of it, in which case amateur surgery is a bloody mess.

What does a person with chunks of his heart missing look like? For me, it's the reflection in the mirror, a face I have to look at everyday. For you, it might look like someone you pass on the street, someone you see at work, someone you buy coffee from, maybe even your own reflection. You've seen him; I know you have. Everyone has.

The terrible, horrible curse of it all is this: repairing a broken heart is much harder than destroying one. Cutting chunks of my heart out and depositing them in an air-tight container under lock and key is a much simpler task than, say, choosing to take that key, unlock said container, and piece that mangled heart back together. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's altogether impossible. On your own, anyway.

The heart is a fantastic, important, beautiful thing. It's you in the most naked sense. Think about this verse:

Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.--Proverbs 4:23

Unfortunately, as mentioned, I'm an idiot, and as part of my training in the ways of Idiotness, I don't guard my heart too well. As one might therefore expect, it isn't in very good shape. It hasn't been for quite a few years. If you asked me to pinpoint a moment or an event that started its nauseating, vertigo-inducing spiral downwards, it's morbid gravitation towards self-mutilation, I really, honest-to-goodness couldn't tell you. But standing in this moment, looking backwards with the oh-so-strong prescription of hindsight I seem to acquire when I want it least, I can see the trail of destruction like a kid on acid sees the rainbow. Except it isn't as pretty.

Imagine a human being with a faulty heart -- he isn't exactly living a life of prime activity. In fact, he's either laying down quietly, sipping tea and watching the nature channel, hoping his heart rate doesn't go up, or he's in the hospital waiting for a stranger to do his best to fix him up and make him better (enough to occasionally watch a bit of the Sci-Fi channel, anyway).

At this point in my life, I'm running on a faulty heart and I know it. It isn't that God didn't make it perfect from the get-go, but like I said, I've done a butcher job on it.

It doesn't take a professional counselor to know that you can't move on if you don't deal with things. Unfortunately for me, as a strict adherer to the way of The Idiot Kyle Move™, shutting down my emotions involves avoiding dealing with anything remotely unpleasant. Want to know what comes of that? It's pretty straight forward, really: you get a guy who doesn't resolve his pain/anger/hurt/misery until he gets to the point where he is no longer a person, only a ghost of a person, a long-forgotten memory of something that could have been. A strong wind, possibly even a mild one, would blow him into Nothingness Land, a land from which no living thing comes back. (And if he does come back, he usually comes as a fairy. Well, ok, I have no idea if that's true or not. But I'd imagine being a fairy would suck...)

I've been living my life on the edge of Nothingness Land for a long time, for too long. It's not a nice place to be. And as I stand in the no-man's land between these two places, I see my two possible options: one, I can continue not dealing with my heart and inevitably fade into the abyss; or two, I can face the pain that I know is stalking me, the pain to whom I still owe one last payment of discomfort and hurt, and begin a much needed trip back to sanity.And by sanity, I really mean sexyness.Ok, no, I do mean sanity.

I'm starting up another blog because, well, it's cheap therapy. And hey, I miss it. But I guess my main goal is to chronicle my never-ending life changes, some emotional growth, some spiritual smartening-up, you know, a taste of the boxing match in my brain between what I thought and what I now think. Or will think.

As annoying as blogs can get, I know that I've learned a lot about people, and about myself, from reading them and writing them. And as much of a pain in your collective derriere as this one may become, I hope you won't throw rocks at me. And if you do, try to just pick the smaller ones, preferably ones with rounded edges so they will bounce off my head with greater ease (something about physics and aerodynamics and all that nonsense).

Lastly, should you indeed read the continuing tales of my horrific Shakespearean struggle through life, feel free to comment.

And by 'feel free', I really mean, 'comment or I will look unsavorably upon a cute bunny just to spite you'.

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( Monday, October 16, 2006 )

Reality continues to ruin my life.

--Calvin & Hobbes

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( Sunday, October 15, 2006 )

They Never Stop to Doubt

The men who build the future are those who know that greater things are yet to come, and that they themselves will help bring them about. Their minds are illuminated by the blazing sun of hope. They never stop to doubt. They haven’t time.

--Melvin J. Evans

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( Monday, October 09, 2006 )

O World of Spring & Autumn

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!The endless cycle of idea and action,Endless invention, endless experiment,Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,But nearness to death no nearer to God.Where is the Life we have lost in living?Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

--T.S. Elliot

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( Saturday, October 07, 2006 )

The Scoop

A warning: should anyone see this page, please be aware that the entire thing could change at any moment. Anything could happen. Without warning. Like...a...storm that comes...without warning...